In this polylog to the special issue on "The rise of Chinese language education policies in the oil-rich Arabian Gulf: New players, discourses and linguistic markets," three researchers with different personal and professional connections to the three languages 'at play' in the region -- English, Chinese, and Arabic -- offer their…

This paper will introduce the subject of language policies and practices in early childhood education across European migration societies and formulate theoretical and methodological questions. It links perspectives from applied linguistics, most explicitly sociolinguistics, and educational research on language (education) policies and practices,…

While language education programs were created with an equity stance in mind--with the goals of increasing access and facilitating academic success for ethnically and linguistically marginalized students--the larger educational context has compromised access for multiply marginalized students. Recognizing a need for more complex understandings of…

Efforts to address the identified needs of labeled groups of children (e.g. identified with disabilities, considered at-risk) may magnify difference and further stigmatize children labeled as different. In this article, we introduce a relational framework to the field of inclusive early childhood education that reframes perceptions of difference…

Arising in Europe in the early 1990s, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has become a popular educational approach. CLIL involves a dual focus on content and language learning with an additional language used as the medium of instruction. Although CLIL has received much attention and spread widely around the world, there is limited…

Background/Context: After decades of restrictive U.S. language policies geared toward English-only education, recent years have seen a proliferation of dual-language programs, Seal of Biliteracy awards, and bilingual education programming more broadly. The demand for such programming ostensibly suggests growing consensus around the benefits of…

This article addresses a growing call for the use of more culturally relevant texts and pedagogy in classrooms. We present how a teacher sharing power with emergent bilingual (EB) students during read-aloud discussions with culturally relevant texts supports EB students' literacy opportunities. These opportunities include (1) initiating new topics…

In the way of commentary, I offer a brief, summative reflection on the complex, multifarious nature of people's semiotic engagements in and with space. Against the backdrop of three snapshot case studies, I suggest there are actually few neat boundaries to be drawn between the linguistic and non-linguistic, between the semiotic and the spatial,…

An increasing number of multilingual organisations such as multinational corporations (MNCs) choose to address linguistic diversity through corporate language policies, for example by adopting a common corporate language. Although a common corporate language may improve efficiency of communication at the front-line level, previous research has…

Scholars use "position" to refer to the social expectations and range of available things a person can say and do in any given interaction (Harré and van Langenhove 1999; van Langenhove 2011). In the classroom, there are different social expectations for teachers and students. Teachers are often expected to give directions, present…

Critical language awareness (CLA) encourages teachers and students to examine language as social practice and reflect on ideologies and power dynamics embedded within language use. In this article, the authors--both instructors in an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) federal grant project at a…

Language textbooks have been--and still are--the centre of attention of substantial research in the field of applied linguistics, language education and instruction, and language studies, among others. This paper synthesizes results and findings from the current Special Issue 'The language textbook: representation, interaction and learning''. In…

This article provides an overview of a digital storytelling proyecto final (final project) completed by 18 young bilingual Latinxs as part of a Spanish for "heritage/native" speakers course at a university in the U.S. Midwest. Specifically, the article charts out the move from concepto (concept) to proyecto, zooming in on key aspects of…

Decolonising the languages curriculum is a radical requirement to critically reexamine the way in which the languages curriculum has been formed in any context. It requires the examination of the power dynamics which have led to the dominance of certain languages over others and which languages are and are not accorded resources in schools,…

What is at stake for multilingual subjects when English becomes a site of conflicting emotions about being in/with the world? What does it mean to understand, negotiate with, and perform the meaning of English as a global curriculum, a lingua franca, a "thing" of the senses, and a desire awakened by narratives feeding into and being fed…